The 16th Annual SF Silent Film Festival Begins Tonight

The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens tonight at the city’s historic Castro Theatre, one of the last great American movie palaces. The four-day festival, which runs from July 14th through July 17th, will feature everything from full-length feature films to short one-reelers and even some foreign silents, as well as guest lectures from film preservationists — including Academy Award honoree Kevin Brownlow.

The festival will open with a presentation of legendary director John Ford’s 1927 romantic drama Upstream, which was long thought a lost film. The film is one of 75 previously considered lost films that were recently discovered in New Zealand and will be restored and preserved with the help of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The film will be presented with live accompaniment by the Donald Sosin Ensemble. Also featured on opening night is F. W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece Sunrise, with live accompaniment provided by Giovanni Spinelli.

Other notable films featured during the festival include:

Huckleberry Finn (William Desmond Taylor, 1920)

I Was Born, But… (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)

Il Fouco (Giovanni Pastrone, 1916)

selections from Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams (1921-1923)

The Goose Woman (Clarence Brown, 1925)

The Woman Men Yearn For (Curtis Bernhardt, 1929)

Shoes (Lois Weber, 1916)

He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

For more information on the festival, including a full line-up and ticketing information, be sure to check out the festival’s website: www.silentfilm.org.

For real-time coverage of the festival follow @oldfilmsflicker on Twitter (look for tweets with the hashtag #yamsfsff). Also look forward to more coverage of the festival as it unfolds.